Elder Race Acheson: The Amazing Race in France: WEEK #1 IN BIENNE, SWITZERLAND!

Hey Friends and family!

I hope that you all are doing great! So, to start off this email, let me say that it seems like i am now serving in Germany. Bienne is on the border of the Swiss-German part of the country. So Bienne has two names. Biel/Bienne. Biel is the German name. All the bus stops are in German and french, and there are signs all over that are in German. I feel like I only hear German speakers on the road. I have a new companion. His name is Elder Tapani from Italy.

What's also cool is that there is another companionship of missionaries that live in the city. They are from the Alpine German Mission. So since they are in our city, and we share the sector, we see them quite often. We have already had dinner together, and we share potential investigator with each other. Because they speak German and we speak French. Its really fun actually.

As for events:

We have already taken the train to go to a few outer villes to pass by people. The sector stretches far and we have to take trains through the mountains to go to them. Its super pretty here and reminds me of Utah.

We visited a family that comes from Albanian in the branch. They loved the fact that my brother served his mission in Albanian. They have a 22 year old son who's not a member and is not too interested in the church, but we came over and ate dinner with them. We then shared a spiritual thought on trails and faith. The son, Misard, said that he liked the video, and wants to have faith. So we will work on him.

After dinner we played his guitar and had a good time with the family. The mom works at Rolex, and we started talking about what she does for work. She puts watches together. Oh, I forgot to tell you all that Bienne is the Swiss Watch capitol of the world. There is a Rolex Headquarters here. They make $60,000+ watches and they are really nice.

We got a referral from the German elders and it was an Italian guy who's like 80. So we started teaching him in Italian. I don't speak Italian but Elder Trapani does! So he is the one that speaks most of the time. His name is Lorenzo.

There is a branch here. There is a German speaking ward, but only a few French speaking members, so its divided into a small group.

We are about 30 mins away from the Bern Swiss Temple. So we have lots of members that go there often and work there. Its weird to be so close to the temple now, and still can't go...

Yesterday we went with our DMB to go help a family in the branch bless their house. There was a death in the family and so they wanted us to come help bless the new house. It was an African family, so after we ate really well!

It has been raining the past few days, and i love it! It reminds me of Washington state. We are high in the mountains and there's trees all over with rain. I'm happy because when I go back to Utah, I will be use to all of the nature there.

So, as for more interesting details, its hard to contact in the road in Bienne because everyone speaks German. We are still going to try this week. We plan to go to outer cities to see if we can find some people.

We don't have that many people that we are teaching. Its just mostly Lorenzo, our Italian grandpa.

There are about 30 people who come to church every week. There are lots of nice cars. I have already seen 6 Electric Teslas, and a Lamborghini. Everyone has Audis and Mercedes. Its pretty nice here!

Well, that's